Sonia Wieder-Atherton on Nina Simone: "There is one thing I am sure of: she moves you and enchants you beyond belief. But then we all know that. What I do not know is the space she is in when suddenly I hear a Bach chorale or a Monteverdi madrigal. I have dived deep into [Nina's] repertory, her arrangements, her harmonic universe and her story too. This project is about offering her the voice of my cello, supported and accompanied by the multi-faceted musicianship of Bruno Fontaine, and the infinite poetry of Laurent Kraif's sounds. For Sonia Wieder-Atherton, music has always been a laboratory. Her unbounded research has taken her from one repertoire to another, from one discovery to the next, in a relentless pursuit of meaning. She enjoys nothing better than to decipher the language of contemporary composers like Pascal Dusapin, Georges Aperghis, and Wolfgang Rihm, all of whom have written for her. Researching the "classical" repertory with equal devotion, her curiosity sets her interpretations apart. In recent years she has instigated a wide range of projects conceived as complete musical and visual experiences, including this, her latest project, Little Girl Blue, from Nina Simone.

The Strad, March 2015Bold reimaginings of [Nina] Simone's own radical, sometimes fierce music... Wieder-Atherton captures the spirit of her subject.